Perhaps because Pasquale Verdicchio can boast a grayish beard worthy of a Greek philosopher - the likes of Plato or Aristotle - or maybe thanks to years and years of teaching in Southern California, or even - if we yield to trite stereotypes - because he is native of Naples, Italy, and thereby notoriously chatty, his dialectic is out of the ordinary.

At the same time, it’s immediately crystal clear how this man is a real font of knowledge.

As he was still a teenager, Pasquale emigrated with his family from Naples, capital of Southern Italian region, Campania, to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In later years, he moved southward to warmer latitudes, settling first in Los Angeles and, then, in San Diego, where he currently holds the position of Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Director of their Italian Studies Program, at UC San Diego.

Pasquale Verdicchio currently holds the position of Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Director of the Italian Studies Program, at UC San Diego "

Being an immigrant himself and, thereby, able to identify with surges of expatriates who never stop feeling somehow marginal to their host countries, Pasquale Verdicchio has penned over the years a wealth of books and publications exploring the Italian diaspora.

Let’s follow his lead then and dig into this fascinating subject.

What was your first love (literature, photography, etc...) and what captivated you the most about it/them?

I was born in Naples, Italy, and emigrated with my family to Vancouver, Canada, in the late 60s. Since a young age, I have always felt most comfortable immersed in books, paintings, photography, advertising images, and the graphics on a variety of products, from candies to a variety of types of packaging.

I used to save up here and there to buy books at a second-hand book stall just outside our building in Naples. I still have those ones, purchased since probably the age of seven or eight, among them adventure stories, Leopardi’s poetry, travel narratives. Some of my early poetry was in fact a series of awful Leopardi-style imitations.

As far as photography, when I was about nine, someone gave me a “Diana”; one of those plastic cameras that took 120 roll films and produced very bad, out of focus photographs.

But those interested me as well. I found the out of focus aspect fascinating and, as a matter of fact, I used one of those photographs as the point of departure for the last chapter of one of my books Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2011).

What captivated and continues to captivate me about these forms of creative expression is simply their inherent qualities for imaginative extrapolation, and to creatively transport a reader or viewer to further explore their imagination and that of those who produced them.

What about your relocation to Los Angeles first, and San Diego later? What was it like your integration in southern California?

I came to California after having returned to Italy and studied/worked with the hermetic poet Piero Bigongiari in Florence. During that time I also met other writers who I eventually would translate, such as Antonio Porta, Giorgio Caproni, and Andrea Zanzotto.

I would say that, back then, “integration” certainly wasn’t among my main preoccupations, although in certain aspects of my life I do still feel somewhat isolated. It is important, after all, to speak one’s language, consume one’s culture, perform one’s culture, and as the years and decades go by a distance grows that sometimes injects some artificiality to these practices.

In any case, I studied for my PhD at UCLA with Prof. Fredi Chiappelli and others, before being hired to teach in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego, in 1986.

This summer, I will be returning to Italy to take on the Directorship of the University of California Study Center, in Bologna, for two years, a position I held from 1998-2000, and for two semesters in 2012 and 2013. I return of my own accord frequently and have remedied the distance in that manner.

Alongside your activity as poet and translator of Italian poets’ works into English, as well as Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at UCSD, you regularly write about Italian-American culture. In particular, in your book, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora, you look at the so-called “Italian Diaspora” through fresh lenses. Could you sum up your take on that?

First of all, I must say that it was first published in 1997, and since then numerous studies have expanded upon and further elucidated some of the arguments I addressed there.

In simple terms, any presumed sense of what some still like to call “italianità” is, in my opinion, based in fiction. The Italic peninsula, situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, has always been a territory of mingling, hybridity, and cross-cultural influence.

If that’s what we mean by italianità, that is totally fine. However, the term is mostly used to refer to an over-arching sense of specificity and homogeneity that couldn’t be further from the reality of our italic regions, cultures, languages, and traditions.

As such, Bound by Distance represented a first attempt at teasing out that diversity, unveiling some of the rhetoric and pseudo-science that had negated it, and following a possible thread through Italic culture to those who emigrated in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I built my work on that of Antonio Gramsci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vito Teti, Luigi Lombardi Satriani, Antonio D’Alfonso, and on the discussions that took place during the early years and conferences of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers of which I was one of the founders in 1986, in Vancouver (with Antonio D’Alfonso, Anna Foschi, Joseph Pivato, and Dino Minni).

What’s your take on the current brain drain of the youth segment of Italy’s population to the US? What is the kind of work that Italy’s Institutions and/or private companies shall do, in order to “stem the flow” and reverse the trend?

First of all, let me say that, fully aware of historical differences, I find the term derogatory, in that it tends to disparage other, previous waves of migrants who also had “brains” but were for a variety of reasons undervalued and discounted.

It also disregards the fact of others who continue to emigrate without advanced degrees and higher education, and their own valuable contributions. All those individuals, and our past histories of emigration, are rendered invisible and irrelevant by the use of that term.

That being said, I recognize that by its use we make reference to the inability of Italian institutions to provide adequate resources for the development and maintenance of a truly innovative and inventive society.

I believe that it is not so much a problem of resources, but rather their proper use, availability, and dissemination, which in conjunction with an antiquated and corrupt system of cronyism, continue to cause internal rot and decay. It is a system at work in universities, private companies, governmental agencies and institutions, that leaves little room for innovation, improvement, and the integration of new participants.

There is no denying that meritocracies have their own set of problems, but it is more than evident that, in Italian society, general merit is too often one of the least important aspects of a person’s set of characteristics.

So, what is needed, in order to stem the flow and reverse the trend, is an overhaul of that antiquated and stifling system. This, in turn, cannot take place without a change of the societal attitudes that make possible its maintenance and proliferation (including the political system and most of its participants, right and left).

While that can certainly happen through the action of a very capable population, somehow Italians are caught in a self-defeating cycle of what we like to refer to as the art of “arrangiarsi” (roughly equivalent to “make do” and “get by”).

Certainly a useful skill to survive in difficult situations, that attitude tends to proliferate that culture of nepotism, favors, and circles of influence rather than open relations based on merit and collaboration.

If you remember the film, Rocco and his Brothers, in a “Gramscian” twist, Visconti assigns the youngest brother Luca an influential role. Luca will grow up in the North, where he will participate in the workers’ movements and, as a carrier of a hybrid north/south culture, he will someday return to the South and bridge the divide.

I see a similar role for those who have to leave Italy today. They may someday return, and participate in altering the system that turned its back to them, by proposing new attitudes, different approaches, and bringing a renewed energy that might well infuse the system with modalities to engage the Italian creativity and know-how.